Santa Cruz on IRQ19???

[Sciascia]

Just wondering if any of you can tell me wat the heck I did here. I reinstalled WinXP and now I have a ton of IRQ's (like virtual IRQ's or something). I do have one problem with lockups (game related, so I won't bore you) but I know that it is sound related because if I lower the HW acceleration it goes away. I am pretty sure tha it is a BIOS setting of some kind, but don't know which one. I would like to reinstall the system using the good old regular IRQ's, since I have plenty of them these days (thanks to no ISA slots on the new MB).

Any ideas?

[Dr Mordrid]

If you have IRQ's >15 then you are running the BIOS in APIC mode (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller).

APIC is a setting you can turn on and off in the BIOS and is becoming common in newer mainboards. My Gigabyte GA-7VRX has it as do many other new boards using the KT266 & KT333 chipsets, as well as many others.

All you ever wanted to know about APIC

The bad things about APIC that no one will tell you;

1. the OS should be installed with APIC turned ON in the BIOS. Otherwise it may not function properly. This means that carry-over installations are not always a good idea.

Basically, if you have a carry-over OS installation and are using a new APIC enabled board you should turn APIC OFF.

2. some hardware will NOT work properly in an APIC system because APIC replaces the old 8259 PIC hardware they were designed to work with. The Santa Cruz works fine with APIC.

3. WinNT/2K/XP only boys & girls. DOS, Win9x etc. will choke on APIC.

Dr. Mordrid

[Sciascia]

Thanks. I had already figured it out last night and reinstalled with APIC disabled. You were right of course, carry over installations do not work at all. I tried to disable it and it wouldn't boot to the OS. I reinstalled and I have the same exact problem. If I lower HW acceleration on the SC to almost all the way off, it will work better, but it still locks up. This is during Spiderman. I know that there are not a lot of gamers over here, but this game is a blast. It's really irritating me at this point. I swapped slots for the SC and it is only sharing with a USB port at this point. I can't sem to get it completely by itself IRQ-wise. I should be able to do this with the HW that I have, I mean I surpass the minimum requirements by far for this game.

Thanks for the info though

[Dr Mordrid]

The Santa Cruz sharing shouldn't be a problem. In my RT-2000 system (Win2K) it shares nicely with the RT2K's IEEE-1394 and the Fasttrak TX4. In XP, however, things can differ significantly

Dr. Mordrid

[Sciascia]

I would say that it is a SW bug thing, but I seem to be the only person anywhere with this problem. Lucky me. It just kind of bugs me, I know that this SC is one of the best out and I really like my system a lot right now. I seppnt a lot of time handpicing each component to avoid issues like this.

What does the HW acceleration actually effect? Only thing that I can guess is that it lessens some of the CPU resources that it may use.

[Dr Mordrid]

The SC uses very few resources to start with. In fact i DirectSound it hardlly uses any at all. Try turning off the voices and see how that affects things. You don't really use those in editing.

Dr. Mordrid